How to prune your Twitter following

Clients, colleagues and my friends all want to increase their follower count. In a world where @Lady Gaga has 25 million souls following her @ladygaga Twitter profile, we’re all in it for the numbers. Not everyone wants lots and lots, some want the right followers. To them, that usually means being discerning when it comes to following someone back. What I do is absolutely follow everyone back to follows me at @chrisabraham.

There’s another option that not many people actually do on a regular basis: pruning the dead leaves and branches away from the little bonsai or the mighty oak you call your Twitter profile.

UnTweeps: Unfollow unloyal followers

I started with UnTweeps, a tool that allowed me to unfollow any and all followers who have not tweeted in X-number of days. I started with 30 days and worked up from there. There’s a free version as well as a very inexpensive subscription or single-pay model you can conveniently pay for using PayPal (3-day non-recurring subscription for $1.37, 1 month non-recurring subscription for $6.49, monthly recurring subscription for only $5 and a 1 year non-recurring subscription for $35).

ManageFlitter: Strategic filteringNext, I explored ManageFlitter, a tool that also allows you to strategically follow, unfollow and white-list folks depending on their not following you back, not having a profile image (just a default egg), having a non-English-speaking profile, being inactive for more than 30 days, being overly talkative, overly quiet or having a “bad ratio,” which is to say, when an account follows way more people than follows it back. I really like ManageFlitter for its versatility. It offers most of its functions for free but I recommend contributing some to their project, and there are quite a few added functions if you become a pro member — $12/month for one user and $24/month for two to five users. What’s really cool with MF is that they offer a thing they call “Google+ To Twitter,” which allows all Google Plus posts to cross-post to Twitter — with a host of amazing settings.

JustUnfollow: Inactive tweeps? You’re dismissed!Finally, I fell for JustUnfollow, which is much more than just unfollowing. It’s quick and easy, simple to use and makes it easy to handily dismiss all the folks who are not following me back or are inactive. I am a pro on there as well, and I am very happy with the ease of use and quickness of the app. A pro account costs $9.99/year for a single user but I have a five-user account for $24.99/year.

I ended up pruning around 38,000 followers. Yes, the result of that means that a lot of people are unfollowing me, too. I have gone from having almost 48,000 followers on Twitter to 45,000. But, I really needed to groom and prune because in the race toward more followers I ended up getting lots and lots of weeds, vines and underbrush, basically strangling out air, space and sun. Pruning may be what you need, too, to keep your Twitter profile in good health.